This was a great read, and I reckon I'd love playing this. The premise was interesting and would lend itself to some cool gameplay. In particular, the enemy and boss ideas were fantastic: the sometimes more humanoid enemies compared with the more machine/object-like bosses really gave the game a sense of inhuman, industrial scale. As the others have mentioned, some of the mechanics also added a real interest and flavour to the game.
The typesetting and design choices really aided the game's atmosphere. The textured heading text and angled subtitles, for example, gave an extra feeling of polish to the whole thing.
It felt like some of the wording was perhaps a bit vague, e.g. the final sentence of the "yes doctor" description, but that might have just been me. With more time, it feels like the game could definitely benefit from some more worldbuilding, to give a sense of what the place is and the feelings it should evoke in the player. Perhaps some example characters (plus short backstories?) could help with this too, or some example rounds of gameplay, as the others have mentioned.
Overall though, this was a great entry. Very original, well thought-out premise, bolstered by some interesting mechanics that were original, but not too complex to pick up. Well done!
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Agony Engine's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| SCREAM MACHINES | #1 | n/a | n/a |
| BEST GAME | #13 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| SCARIEST GAME | #31 | 2.700 | 2.700 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
There is a lot of complexity to this game - I don't think I've seen a rulebook this large completed for a jam! The upside to this is that there is a significant amount of flavor to make the game mechanics unique - character backgrounds, stats, different enemies with different abilities. As Christine said, the prize mechanic is particularly great because it gives the player a lot of latitude to approach the game how they want. As others have noted, the tradeoff is that a large manual requires a little preparation. But I think this could be very dynamic and fun to play too!
Still love that janky font and distorted layout - it makes the rulebook unique and charming.
Thanks for submitting Agony Engine to the SCREAM MACHINE jam!
- SCREAM CATALOGUE
This game feels very sharp and clever! Particularly the prize mechanic feels very fluid in rewarding the player and developing the challenges they face. Really enjoyed reading and running through this. To add onto others, an example of play would make reading more fluid, as I definitely had to jump back and forth between sections a few times before understanding.
I had a damn good time running this for myself! There were some situations where I wrote down questions before freehanding a solution; I'll collate them and ask them somewhere else later if that's okay. Love how grody and organic this stuff conjured itself!
I thought this was pretty cool, I liked the unique style to it. It definitely felt more inspired than a typical dungeon crawler. I did find it a bit confusing once I got down to actually playing. I think, if you plan on doing any updates to this, it would really benefit from an example round or two of play written out.
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